Search

The characteristics of a scaffold that is the basic component of tissue engineering are considerably influenced by the fiber diameter of the fibrous scaffolds. Since the significant effect of the fiber diameter on the scaffold properties, many researchers have focused on estimating the fiber diameter based on the electrospinning parameters. With similar motivation, in this paper, a new and simple closed-form expression, which can help researchers in fabricating the electrospun poly (ԑ-caprolactone) (PCL) scaffold with desired fiber diameter, is presented. In order to construct the expression proposed, an experimental study has been performed to obtain the data set, in which 25 experimental data including average fiber diameter (AFD) values dependent on different combinations of parameters such as voltage, solution concentration, tip to collector (TTC) distance, and flow rate. Then, an expression has been constructed that is used to estimate the AFD of the electrospun PCL, and the coefficients of the expression were determined by using the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. In order to validate the estimation ability of the expression, the metrics such as mean absolute error (MAE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) have been used, and the optimization and test errors were respectively obtained as 3.30% and 1.27% in terms of MAPE. In addition, the results obtained were compared with those reported in the literature. Results show that our new expression can be successfully used to estimate the AFD of electrospun PCL prior to the electrospinning process. Thus, the number of test repetitions could be reduced by using the expression proposed, and time, cost, and labor could be saved in this way. This study contributes to the literature because there have been only a limited number of studies that focus on estimating the AFD of PCL nanofiber despite many studies about various polymers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]